Morgwold Forest

"The gnarled, oozing forest contained horrors I never imagined. It started out as a spinning headache whenever I'd look at each rune-inscribed rock. By the time I reached the lady's court, my mind had succumbed to madness. I could barely tell at that point if the rotten dead were really walking towards me."



It is the great wild shrouded in danger and mystery. It is the ancient forest that induces despair and madness upon outsiders who tarry too long within. It is the woodland kingdom of territorial beasts, fey, and undead. While many elves, halflings and other standard sylvan races call the place home, much of the great forest has been consumed by darkness. Instead of bearing sweet fruit, the trees of Morgwold wrap their vines around the buried dead and give them life anew. The fairies that flutter carry poisonous stingers. The seemingly normal animals are often ridden with terrible "Rotborn" deformities, that is, their normal hides are covered in moss, slime, and decay. The juxtaposition of vibrant life-forms consumed in ominous death is one of Morgwold's most daunting paradoxes.



The deeper recesses contain crumbling shrines from pre-history, monolithic runestones, rivers of poison, and conclaves of embryonic sacs filled with pseudonatural trolls. Most rational creatures have long since abandoned these terrible parts. The bravest sylvan rangers consider it a rite of passage to hunt in Deeper Morgwold; forever praised are the few heroic elves who bring back a Dracolich skull or Plaguewurm hide.



Although hostile and desolate, Morgwold is actually home to a grim nation of sorts. If studied long enough, one notices that the fungus covered skeletons that roam haplessly are actually on patrol. There lives a beautiful lady in the heart of the woods. She is naive, yet stern and unpredictable, much like nature itself. She is known by many names, the Queen of Frogs, the Faery Matron, or the Bramble Witch. To any person so resilient and resolute as to successfully gain an audience in her thicket court, she would merely introduce herself by her proper name Morthissa. The Bramble Witch employs legions of the slimey and compost-filled undead. She is the source of the Rotborn, the many trolls, fey, and shamblers marked with decaying matter. No one knows what she truly guards, but suffice it that one could spend a lifetime scouring the forest maze to no avail.



The ominous runes are just another one of Morgwold's mysteries. Some say that they are the source of Morthissa's influence, and others wager that they were here long before she arrived. Venturers claim that these stones "whisper" to them in passing, and what they tell seems to be too alien for normal minds to accept without being damaged. Missing people are often found days later huddled against these stones babbling to themselves. Those that are not careful are driven to madness, but perhaps it is a choicer fate to being found by the shambling dead or engulfed by a huge green worm.

Some believe that as Rasa is sucked of its elemental energies, the greatest horrors of the Planes are permitted to bleat through. The more rational inhabitants of Morgwold view man's industrialization as a threat to the very future of the planet. The leaves stir with whispers that it is time to act accordingly.